Colour traditional tattoo of a cat wearing a teal collar in an ornate gold frame, with a red rose and black leaves below, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in an ornate frame above a red rose

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cat with a patterned tabby-like coat, yellow eyes and a teal buckled collar sits inside an ornate gold oval frame topped with a small crown motif. Below it, a large red rose with white highlights and bold black outlines is surrounded by black leaves. The linework is heavy and the colour is flat with some soft grey shading on the cat's fur, and the design is centred on the upper leg.

Traditional Neo-trad Thigh Cat Rose Frame Collar Crown Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who carries the frame up from the cart, because the cat will not be carried by anyone else. The gilt oval has been wrapped in sacking since the fair at Wenning, and through the sacking you can feel the cat turning its weight from side to side, the way a sleeper turns at a distant door. The painter who made it was paid in eggs and a pair of boots, and he gave the cat a teal collar with a brass buckle because, he said, a proper portrait needs something the sitter would not choose for herself.

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The beeches close in at the forest edge, and the light goes green and then grey. You lean the frame against a stump and pull the sacking away. The yellow eyes look past you into the trees, not at you, and the small gilt crown above the oval catches the last of the sun. Beneath it the painted rose has bled a little at its heart where the damp got in, so that it seems to be opening while you watch. You have been told not to touch the paint. You touch it anyway, and it is warm, like a cup someone has only just put down.

When you look up the cat is out of the frame. It has left a faint orange smudge on the canvas where its shoulder was, and the grey shading along its flank hangs loose in the air like smoke. You follow the flick of its tail for an hour through roots and wet ferns, until you find it sitting beside a single red rose growing from a rotten log, the only one for miles. It looks back at you the way a portrait looks at a visitor who has come in without knocking.

You walk home with the empty frame on your back. In the morning there are small wet pawprints across the flagstones of your kitchen, going out of the door and coming back in, and the painted cat is sitting in its oval again, its collar a little looser than before.